Bio

Ahmed Ragab is The Richard T. Watson Associate
Professor of Science and Religion at Harvard Divinity School, affiliate associate
professor at the department of the history of science, and director of the
Science, Religion and Culture program at Harvard University.

Ragab is a historian of science and medicine,
and a scholar of science and religion. He received his M.D from Cairo
University School of Medicine in 2005, and PhD from the Ecole Pratiques des
Hautes Etudes in Paris in 2010. He is the author of “The Medieval Islamic
Hospital: Medicine, Religion and Charity” (Cambridge University Press, 2015).

Ragab’s research focuses on the history of
medicine, science and religion and the development of cultures of science and
cultures of religion in the Middle East and the Islamic World. He also studies
and publishes on gender and sexuality in the medieval and early modern Middle
East, postcolonial studies of science and religion and other questions in the
history of science and religion. His “The Medieval Islamic Hospital: Medicine,
Religion and Charity” (Cambridge University Press, 2015) was the first
monographic study of Islamic hospitals. It analyzed hospitals as central
institutions of the medieval Muslim city that conditioned the city’s physical,
medical and spiritual landscape. The book places the Islamic hospital within
localized narratives of need, health and sickness, and discusses how they
impacted medical thought and practice at the time. His “Piety and Patienthood
in Medieval Islam” (Routledge Press, 2018) examined the pious construction of
patienthood in the early Islamic medieval period. It investigated the deeper
history of the prophetic medicine literature uncovering how pious narratives
and writings of medical and religious scholars in the classical Islamic period
conditioned the ways Muslim patients understood their bodies and experienced
diseases, how they approached medical care, and how they perceived their
suffering and recovery. Finally, his “Medicine and Religion in the Life of an
Ottoman Sheikh” (Routledge, 2019) traces the life and career of al-Shaykh Aḥmad
al-Damanhūrī, who was the rector of al-Azhar university in the second half of
the eighteenth century, as a religious scholar with a remarkable scientific and
medical career. The book sheds light on the place of science and medicine in
Egyptian Ottoman scholarly culture on the eve of colonization.

Ragab is currently working on two new book
projects. The first “Communities of Knowledge: Science in Medieval Europe and
Islamdom” (Under contract with Princeton University Press) is co-authored with
Professor Katharine Park (Harvard University). The book looks at the history of
medieval and early modern science across traditional boundaries separating
Europe and the Islamic world, using objects to investigate the production of
scientific knowledge and practice. The book investigates objects as
meaning-bearing categories that provoke epistemic investigations, which in turn
maintain or disrupt these objects’ coherence. The second, “Around the Clock:
Time in Medieval Islamic Clinical Cultures” (under contract with Johns Hopkins
University Press), investigates the place of time as an epistemic and cultural
category in medical thought and practice. It looks at how time is articulated
in a variety of contexts, from understanding seasonal variations and
astrological and astronomical changes, to aging, to disease progress and to the
place of time in defining gender categories.

Ragab’s work investigates colonial and
postcolonial science, technology and medicine in the Middle East. His work
discusses debates on progress and reform in the nineteenth and twentieth
century, the establishment of new medical and scientific faculties in the
region, and the formation of new scientific elites. His most recent works have
paid attention to the affective economies underwriting the making of colonial
and postcolonial science and medicine. He investigates the production of modern
western medical systems of thought, practice and education in the colonial and
postcolonial Middle East and Islamic world. In this context, he looks at how
new and old medical cultures interacted in the daily work of physicians and
medical practitioners, and in the physician-patient encounters.